THE HOME OF LARAMIE
Almost due north of Sleepy Cat the Lodge Pole Mountains, tumbling over
one another in an upheaval southward, are flung suddenly to the west
and spread in a declining ridge to the Superstition range. South of
the Lodge Poles the country is very rough, but at the point where the
range is so sharply deflected there spreads fanlike to the east an open
basin with good soil and water. It is known locally as the Falling
Wall country, and, as the names of the region indicate, it was once
famous as a hunting ground, and so, as a fighting ground, for the
powerful tribes of early days. And an ample Reservation in this
basin--ending just where the good lands begin--is the stamping ground
of the last of the mountain red men.
But the struggle for possession of the Falling Wall country did not end
with the red men. White men, too, have coveted the lands of the
Falling Wall and fought for them. Among the blind the one-eyed are
kings, and the Falling Wall basin lies amid inhospitable deserts,
barren hills and landscapes slashed to rags and ribbons by mountain
storms--regions that have failed to tempt even a white man's cupidity.
The Indians fought for the basin with arrows, bullets, tomahawks and
scalping knives; the whites have fought chiefly in the land offices and
courts, but, exasperated by delays and inflamed by defeat, they have at
times boiled over and appealed to the rifle and the hip holster for
decrees to quiet title.
It is for these reasons, and others, that the Falling Wall country has
borne a hard and somewhat sinister name, even in a region where men
have been habitually indifferent to restraint and tolerant of violent
appeals to frontier justice. In the very early days of the white man
the Indian clung to the Falling Wall country as his last stand; for the
bad lands along the canyon of the Falling Wall river made, as they yet
make, an almost impenetrable fastness for sally and retreat.
But even before the Indians were driven into their barren cage to the
north, white adventurers had penetrated the basin and it became, with
the shifting of possession, a region for men of hard repute. Its
traditions have been bad and few in the Falling Wall country have felt
concern over the fact.
Yet, from the earliest days, despite the many difficulties of living in
the widely known but not large park, a few hardy settlers managed from
the beginning, in secluded portions of the region, to keep their scalps
and their horses and to live through Indian days and outlaw
days--though not often in peace, and never in quiet.
Among these early adventurers was one known as "Texas" Laramie, because
he had the extraordinary courage, or hardihood, to bring into the
Falling Wall the first cattle ever driven into the mountains from the
Panhandle. In a country where the sobriquet is usually the only name
by which it is courteous or safe to address a man, and where it is
invariably apt, few men are accorded two. But Laramie had also been
known as "Pump" Laramie because he brought into that country the first
Winchester rifle; and the instinctive significance the mind attaches to
the combination of cows and a repeating rifle was, in this instance,
justified--there was between the two a direct, even dynamic,
connection. Laramie thus figured prominently in the older Falling Wall
feuds. It would have been difficult for him to figure obscurely, and
do it more than once.
Enemies said that he stole the bunch of cattle he first drove into the
Falling Wall. It was not true but it made a good story. And in any
event, Texas Laramie defended his steers vigorously against all men
advancing claim to them between darkness and daylight--as enterprising
neighbors not infrequently undertook to do. With the cattle, Laramie
had brought into the mountains a wife from Texas. She was a young
mother with a little boy, Jim; a good mother, never happy in the
country so far away from the Staked Plain--and not very long to live
there. But she lived long enough to send Jim year after year to the
Sisters' School on the Reservation.
To obtain for a boy any sort of an education in a region so wild and so
inhospitable would have seemed impossible. Yet devoted
Sisters--refined and aristocratic American women--were already in this
mountain country devoting their lives to the Indian Missions. Under
such women little Jim learned his Catechism and his reading and from
them and their example a few of the amenities of life--so far removed
from him in every other direction. Under their care he grew up, after
he had lost his mother, among the Indian boys. With these he learned
to fish and hunt, to trap for pocket money, to use a bow and arrow and
a knife, to trail and stalk patiently, to lie uncomplainingly in cold
and wet, to ride without saddle or bridle or spur, to face a grizzly
without excitement, to use a rifle where the price of every cartridge
was reckoned and a poor aim sometimes cost life itself.
And every summer at home his father added extension courses in the
saddle and bridle, spur, hackamore and lariat to his education. He
taught him to rope, throw and mark, to use a coffee pot and frying pan,
and at last on the great day--the Commencement day, so to say of the
boy's frontier education--he presented him with his degree--a Colt's
revolver and a box of cartridges--and died. As he lay on his deathbed,
Texas Laramie left a parting advice to his young son: "You've learned
to shoot, Jim--you don't shoot bad for a youngster. A man's got to
shoot. But the less shooting you do, after you've learned--without
you're forced to it, mind you--the more comfortable you'll feel when
you get where I am now. All I can say is: I never killed an honest man
that I knowed of. In fact," his breath came very slowly, "I never yet
seen an honest man in the Falling Wall to kill."
And Jim began life with the ranch, youth, a little bunch of cattle, no
money and much health in the Falling Wall. His first year alone he
never forgot, for in the spring he drove all his steers--not a great
many--into the new railroad town, south--Sleepy Cat--and sold them for
more money than he had ever seen at one time in his life. He wandered
from the bank into Harry Tenison's gambling rooms--Harry having sold
out his livery stable to Joe Kitchen shortly before that--just to look
on for a little while before starting home. When Laramie did start
home, Tenison had all his steer money and Laramie owed the sober-faced
gambler, besides, one hundred dollars. Laramie then went to work on
the range for twenty-five dollars a month. He worked four months, and
it was hard work, took his pay check in and handed it to Tenison. That
was strangely enough the beginning of a friendship that was never
broken. Tenison tried to give the check back to Laramie. He could
not. But Laramie never again tried to clean out the bank at Tenison's.
The Laramie cabin on Turkey Creek--the son built afterward on the same
spot--stood on a slight conical rise some distance back from the little
stream that watered the ranch. From his windows Jim Laramie could look
on gently falling ground in all directions. Toward the creek lay an
alfalfa field which, with a crude irrigating ditch and water from the
creek, he had brought to a prosperous stand. Below the alfalfa stood
the barn and the corral.
The day after Kate Doubleday's adventure with him at the Junction,
Laramie was riding up the creek to his cabin when a man standing at the
corral gate hailed him. It wag Ben Simeral. Ben, old and ragged, met
every man with a smile--a bearded, seamed and shabby smile, but an
honest smile. Ben was a derelict of the range, a stray whose appeal
could be only to patient men. Whenever he wandered into the Falling
Wall country, where he had a claim, he made Laramie's cabin a sort of
headquarters and spent weeks at a time there, looking after the stock
in return for what John Lefever termed the "court'sies" of the ranch.
Laramie, greeting Ben, made casual inquiry about the stock. Ben looked
at him as if expectant; but Ben was not aggressive for news or anything
else. He grinned as he looked Laramie over: "Well, you're back again,
Jim."
Laramie responded in kindly fashion: "Anybody been here?"
"Nary critter," declared the custodian, "'cept Abe Hawk--he came over
to borry your Marlin rifle."
"What did he want with that?"
"Said he was going up into the mountains but he's comin' over again
before he starts. I knowed he helped you track them wire scouts over
to Barb's. The blame critters tore off all the wire t'other side the
creek, too. Get any track of 'em?" he asked, sympathetically alive to
what had been most on Laramie's mind when he had started from home.
Laramie barely hesitated but he looked squarely at Ben and answered in
even tones: "No track, Ben."
Ben looked at him, still smiling with a kindly hope:
"Hear from the contest on the creek quarter?"
"They told me at Medicine Bend it had gone against me."
"Psho! Never! You've got another 'go' to Washington, hain't y'?"
Laramie nodded and got down from his horse. Ben, removing the saddle,
asked more questions--none of them important--and after putting up the
horse the two men started for the house. Its rude walls were well laid
up in good logs on which rested a timbered roof, shingled.
A living-room with a fireplace roughly fashioned in stone made up the
larger interior of the cabin. To the right of the fireplace a kitchen
opened off the living-room and adjoining this, to the right as one
entered the front door, was a bedroom. To the left stood a small
table, on which were scattered a few old books, a metal lamp and
well-thumbed copies of old magazines. Beside the table stood a heavy
oak Morris chair of the kind sold by mail-order houses. Two other
chairs, heavily built in oak, were disposed about the room, and on the
left of the entrance--there was but one door--stood a cot bed. On the
floor between the door and the fireplace lay a huge silver tip
bearskin, the head set up by an Indian taxidermist. It was some time
afterward when Kate saw the cabin, but she remembered, even after it
lay in ruins, just how the interior had looked.
The four walls were really more furnished than the rest of the room.
To the right and left of the fireplace hung twin bighorn heads, and elk
and stag antlers on the other walls supplied racks for an ample variety
of rifles, polished by familiar use and kept, through love of trusty
friends, in good order. Trophies of the hunt, disposed sometimes in
effective and sometimes in mere man fashion, flanked the racks and
showed the tastes of the owner of the isolated habitation; for few
trails led within miles of Laramie's ranch on the Turkey.
"Breakfast?" Simeral looked at his companion, who stood vacantly
musing at the door of the kitchen.
"Coffee," answered Laramie, taking off his jacket, laying his Colt's on
the table and slipping off his breast harness.
"I got no bread," announced Ben, to forestall objection. "Flour's low
'n' I didn't bake."
"Crackers will do."
"Ain't no crackers, neither," returned Ben, raising his voice and his
smile in self-defense.
"Give me coffee and bacon," suggested Laramie, impatiently.
"'N' I'll fry some potatoes," muttered Ben, shuffling with a show of
speed into the kitchen, and calling inquiries back in his unsteady
voice to the living-room, patiently digging at Laramie for scraps of
news from Sleepy Cat, volunteering, in return, scraps from the range
and ranch. Laramie sat down in the nearest chair, tilted it slightly
back, and resting one arm on the table gazed into the empty fireplace.
He appeared as if much preoccupied--nor would, nor could, he talk of
what was in his mind, nor think of anything else.
Some minutes later he began in the same absent-minded manner on a huge
plateful of bacon, with a pot of coffee in keeping, and was eating in
silence when the stillness of the sunshine was broken by the sound of a
horse's hoofs. Laramie looked out and saw, through the open door, a
horseman riding in leisurely fashion up from the creek.
The man was tall. He swung lightly out of his saddle near the door,
and as he walked into the house it could be seen that he was
proportioned in his frame to his height; strength and agility revealed
themselves in every move. A rifle slung in a scabbard hung beside the
shoulder of the horse, and the man's rig proclaimed the cowboy, though
aside from a broad-brimmed Stetson hat his garb was simplicity itself.
It was the way in which he carried his height and shoulders that
arrested attention, nor was his face one easily to be forgotten. He
wore a jet-black beard that grew close and dropped compactly down. It
was neither bushy nor scraggly and with his black brows it made a
striking setting for strong and rather deep-set eyes which if not
actually black were certainly very dark. His smile revealed white,
regular teeth under his dark mustache, and his olive complexion, though
tanned, seemed different from those of men that rode the range with
him--perhaps it was owing to the glossy, black beard.
Abe Hawk was evidently at home in Laramie's cabin. He stepped through
the door and pushing his hat back on his forehead took a chair and sat
down. The two men, masters of taciturnity, looked at each other while
this was taking place, and as Hawk seated himself Laramie called for a
cup and pushed the coffee pot toward his visitor. Paying no attention
to the unspoken invitation, Hawk's features assumed the quizzical lines
they sometimes wore when he relaxed and poked questions at his friend.
"Well," he demanded, banteringly, "where's Jimmie been?"
"Medicine, Sleepy Cat--pretty near everywhere."
"I hear you got a job."
"I was offered one."
"Deputy marshal, eh?"
"Farrell Kennedy got me down to Medicine Bend to talk it over."
"What's the matter, couldn't you hold it?"
"I didn't want it."
"You're out of practise on this law-and-order stuff--you've lived up
here too long among thieves, Jim. Find out who tore down your wire?"
Laramie replied in even tones but his voice was hard: "I trailed them
across the Crazy Woman. It was somebody from Doubleday's ranch."
"They had a story at Stormy Gorman's you'd gone over there to blow
Barb's head off."
"Barb wasn't home."
Hawk was conscious of the evasion. "Was Stormy's talk true?" he
demanded curtly.
"I expected to ask Barb whether he wanted to put my wire back. I was
going to give him a chance."
"It wouldn't be hard to guess how that would come out. Where was he?"
asked Hawk, with evident disappointment.
"They said he was in Sleepy Cat. I rode in and missed him there. He'd
gone to the mines. I took the train up to the Junction, There I
accidentally got switched off my job and came home."
"How'd you get switched off?" asked Hawk, resenting the outcome.
Laramie's manner showed he disliked being bored into. He leaned
forward with a touch of asperity and looked, straight at his visitor:
"By not 'tending strictly to my own business, Abe."
Hawk knew from the expression of Laramie's eyes he must drop the
subject, and though he lost none of his bantering manner, he desisted:
"They didn't have a warrant for me down at the marshal's office, did
they?"
"They were short of blanks," retorted Laramie coolly.
"How you fixed for flour?"
"Plenty of it." Laramie spoke loudly for fear Simeral might protest.
Then he called promptly to the kitchen: "Ben, get up some flour for
Abe."
Ben quavered a protest.
"Get it up now before you forget it," insisted Laramie.
"Is Tom Stone still foreman over at Doubleday's?"
"I guess he is," returned Laramie.
"What does Doubleday aim to do with Stone?" asked Hawk, cynically,
"steal his own cattle from himself?"
"A cattleman nowadays might as well steal his own cattle as to wait for
somebody else to steal 'em." Laramie spoke with some annoyance.
"There's going to be trouble for these Falling Wall rustlers."
"Meaning me?" asked Hawk, contemptuously.
"I never mean you without saying you, Abe--you ought to know that by
this time. But this running off steers is getting too raw. From the
undertalk in Sleepy Cat there's going to be something done."
"Who by?"
"By the cattlemen."
"I thought," Hawk spoke again contemptuously, "you meant by the
sheriff."
"But I didn't," said Laramie. "I meant by the bunch at the range. And
when they start they'll stir things up over this way."
Hawk hazarded a guess on another subject: "It looks like Van
Horn--putting in Stone over at Doubleday's."
"It is Van Horn."
Hawk looked in silence out of the open door at the distant snow-capped
mountains. "Why don't you kill him, Jim?" he asked after a moment,
possibly in earnest, possibly in jest, for his iron tone sometimes
meant everything, sometimes nothing.
Laramie, at all events, took the words lightly. He answered Hawk's
question with another. But his retort and manner were as easy as
Hawk's question and expression were hard. "Why don't you?"
The bearded man across the table did not hesitate nor did he cast about
for words. On the contrary, he replied with embarrassing promptness:
"I will, sometime."
"A man that didn't know you, Abe, might think you meant it," commented
Laramie, filling his coffee cup.
Hawk's white teeth showed just for the instant that he smiled; then he
talked of other things.